May 18, 2011

This is a very intriguing study about how social media/interactions may be warping “crowd wisdom” — defined as “the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers”. In this study, researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight (a.k.a., group regression to the mean) “went awry”. You can think about this as introducing dependencies, and hence biases in the sample statistics.

Perhaps related to the above is the mounting criticism of “personalization” as introducing biases in what (say) search engines return to different people for the same exact query — Google now is personalizing Google search and Google News…

There is something to be said for having crowds have consistent views of the world…